


What Does Your Third Heart Tell You?

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Undercover Cops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 11:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4390052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They partner him with a new transfer from San Francisco, because she doesn’t know to avoid him yet.</p><p>Her name is Clarke Griffin, and the first thing she ever says to him is "I heard you’re an asshole." He likes her immediately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Does Your Third Heart Tell You?

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sealed one-shot, and I will not be elaborating on this verse. It's just something that was rattling around in my head for a while.
> 
> Title from an episode of NCIS LA, because I'm a sucker for shows with acronyms in the title.

Bellamy is different from his sister, in that he isn’t opposed to pissing people off. In fact, it’s one of his favorite hobbies. Octavia depends on charisma and charm, and thrives on friendships with others. That isn’t to say that Bellamy isn’t popular—because he is—but he is also treated with a fair amount of disdain, mostly by the rest of his police force. As an undercover specialist, Bellamy has succeeded in making almost every cop in Los Angeles hate him.

 _Undercover Specialist_ is the term his boss came up with. Bellamy has gone through six partners in two years. His chief threatened to force Bellamy into the field without a partner, and Bellamy wishes he would. He works better on his own, anyway.

But going it alone is against station policy, so they partner him with a new transfer from San Francisco, because she doesn’t know to avoid him yet.

Her name is Clarke Griffin, and the first thing she ever says to him is _I heard you’re an asshole_. He likes her immediately.

They both hate donuts but love Chinese food. They both take their jobs seriously but not themselves. Neither likes to talk backstories, and they both enjoy meaningless conversation. She’s new to undercover work but she’s a quick learner and soon the pair is moving up the line towards promotion. Clarke wants to be president one day, and Bellamy wants to retire in the Bahamas and sleep in a shack.

Bellamy evolves from the Lone Wolf, to one half of the Dynamic Duo. They’re the talk of the station; a pair of chameleons. Each month, they’re diving deep into some illegal operation with fake names and fake accents, and they always get the arrest.

Few pairings at the station are coed, and most of the force is made up of men, so for the first few months they all corner Bellamy in the locker room like jackals, begging to hear stories of his partner in bed.

The first to ask ends up with a broken nose, while Bellamy gets a week’s suspension. For the next five days, Clarke is forced on patrol with a rotation of leering officers trying to get a peek beneath her bulletproof vest. She makes Bellamy promise no more suspensions, and his fingers grow cramped with the effort. He’s not good at _not_ throwing punches. After two weeks of no reprimands, or write-ups, Kane actually asks if he’s feeling okay.

Eventually the teasing and curiosity give way to disinterest, as it becomes clear that if Blake and Griffin are sleeping together, they aren’t going to admit it.

For two years, they’re nothing but partners and very good friends. It’s easy for Bellamy to see her appeal; she’s a beautiful young woman filled with energy and passionate about changing the world. She rubs people the wrong way, sometimes, but Bellamy kind of likes knowing he’s one of the few people that _gets_ her. She can aim and fire a gun while running, and nine out of ten fights she’d win. Everything she tries to cook came out raw or blackened, and she kills each and every houseplant she ever owned, and she’s secretly a romantic, but doesn’t want anybody to know. The password to her computer is TITANIC, which. He laughs so hard he _cries_ when he finds out about that. She won’t speak to him for two days.

She spends every vacation she takes in Hawaii, visiting her father’s grave, and catching up with her oldest friend Wells, which Bellamy tries not to feel jealous about. He offers to go with her once, and he pretends to be more drunk than he really is so he can blame the alcohol if she feels weird about it. But she lets him down softly, saying it’s something she has to do on her own, and he can’t really fault her for that. Plus she seems sort of disappointed about it, so. It’s a small comfort.

They’re at her apartment watching baseball, which they do every Sunday even though Bellamy can’t get the hang of the rules. Clarke’s father had been a minor league manager back in Hawaii, and she’s been trying to explain the sport to Bellamy for the past year. They’ve had a few drinks and both are suitably tipsy. Clarke’s team is winning, so she’s in good spirits. He turns to ask her what the ref has just called, and he realizes she’s wearing her hair up, so he can see the blue of her eyes in the reflecting light of the television. The nape of her neck shines with a slight film of sweat. She smells like tequila and mint toothpaste.

He kisses her before he can think better of it, and she kisses him back instead of pushing away. They sit kissing for what seems like hours, and fall asleep tangled up on the couch. The TV is still on when they wake, blaring a local news channel. His mouth tastes sour and the back of his throat is dry. He has the beginnings of a hangover, and she stirs slightly underneath him as he peels back his limbs from hers.

They agree it was a silly drunk kiss, bound to happen eventually. They laugh about it later. Bellamy thinks about apologizing, but decides he isn’t really sorry. It was a nice kiss, and he liked the feel of her hair in his fingers.

Two more years come and go and they’re careful to keep a few inches between them each Sunday night. They still don’t talk about their pasts, but he has dinner with her mother. She’s visiting from DC, a pretty, stoic woman that isn’t good with small talk. He almost asks if she knows his sister, since they live and work in the same city, but he remembers himself at the last second. He knows she and Clarke have had a rocky last few years, but they’re laughing over linguini and herring, sharing anecdotes from Clarke’s childhood. Apparently she dressed up as a princess for Halloween for eight years in a row.

“I hope you know I’m calling you that from now on,” Bellamy smirks, and Clarke whines the way she does when she isn’t actually upset about it.

Abby says she likes his hair. Clarke laughs that half-snort laugh she has. “Don’t encourage him _,”_ she says. She’s been trying to make him cut his curls since the beginning. He finishes his dinner smugly.

When he starts calling Octavia every day, Clarke thinks he has a girlfriend back east he won’t tell her about.

“How do you know it’s not my mother?”he laughs when she pesters him.

The look on her face tells him she knows. She probably did a background check on him when they were first partnered up. He can’t blame her; he looked her up the minute he found out her name.

“How do you know it’s not my grandmother, or long-lost aunt?”

She doesn’t answer.

Bellamy isn’t sure why he never tells her about Octavia. Sometimes Clarke slips up and laughs over a story from her childhood, spent running around with cousins and all the neighborhood stray cats. Bellamy is careful to never blurt out any family secrets. He keeps O’s existence to himself, and it’s the one thing Clarke never pries about.

Octavia hasn’t visited since Clarke’s arrival. She always complains about the L.A. heat; as if Carney, Virginia was any better. He knows she’s probably just avoiding the _what if_ that his apartment provided. _What if_ she had taken him up on that offer, four years earlier? They both know the answer, but it doesn’t stop the wondering. Just like nothing can stop him from wondering about his drunken kiss with Clarke. It’s often the last thing he thinks about before he falls asleep.

Bellamy hasn’t spoken to Octavia in a few days, now; too deep undercover to chance a phone call. She knows as much as he could tell her—which is practically all of it, since she’s somehow wrangled a clearance just higher than his own—but he knows she’s still worried. He’s always worried, since she told him about her new gig with the FBI, and for the first time in his life he feels guilty about his line of work, because the tangled web of knots stretching out his stomach must have been torturing her for the past five years.

He’s still thinking about his sister as he works the lock open on the motel door. He can’t just flash his badge to the manager to make him open the door, and he doesn’t feel like bribing the bastard, so he kneels on the grungy cement and picks at the corroded metal. Clarke slipped into a barely-there dress to keep the dealer occupied, while Bellamy snoops around his room. Supposedly, he keeps his client list in the mattress and if they manage to snag it this afternoon, they’ll have their identities back before dinner.

He’s thinking pizza, at that new place on 24th, with the broccoli-cauliflower pies Clarke likes so much. They’ll shower and change at the station, and then wander down and spend a few hours in the perfectly greasy diner, before ending up at her place, like usual. Her couch is more comfortable, and he can’t really remember the last time they spent the night separated. They’re telling their coworkers they carpool, which isn’t a total lie.

He tries not to think about what it means, that he has his own toothbrush at her place, and she has a bottle of coconut-lemon shampoo in his shower.

The lock clicks and he grins, dentures chafing against his gums. He hates playing junkies; he has to wear piss-stained clothes and rotted teeth. Clarke painted meth scabs on his face with some markers. He scratches at them absent mindedly, and then hopes he hasn’t smeared the ink.

The door slides open easier than it should have, and he realizes why, too late. Across the room, smiling back at him is a greasy-looking man with gelled back hair and a sharp nose, broken too many times. He’s a comic book villain, down to the glint in his eyes, but they aren’t what Bellamy is focused on. He’s staring at the man’s gun, a .45, trained on the center of his chest.

He opens his mouth to speak—unsure what to say, but still trying—as the bullet pours down the barrel and tears through his bone.

There’s no slow motion or soundtrack or screaming. There’s pain and then there isn’t. He sinks down to his knees without meaning to. His head hits the floor and he knows it should hurt. He can’t feel his tongue. He can’t feel anything. He thinks he hears Clarke calling his name, but he isn’t sure. He doesn’t see if the man left or waited. Eventually all he sees is white.

 

Clarke was in just two fights before transferring to the LAPD. Since becoming an _Undercover Specialist_ and Bellamy Blake’s partner, she’s been in twenty-seven, over the course of four years.

The inside of Walden Clinic is no mystery to Clarke. It’s on the south end of the city, so most of the patients are wounded during gang fights or dealings. More than a dozen of her fellow cops have been treated inside these walls, including Bellamy the night a heroin junkie stabbed him in the arm.

But staring at him now, through the window as the surgeons try to patch him back together, it’s different. His badge and gun are tucked inside her bag, like a wound against her ribcage. She holds her hands out in front of her so she won’t touch anything. They’re still sticky with his blood. Her knees and boots and the ends of her hair are all a stiff red. The dress is ruined. It’s all she can do not to scream from the nerves eating away at her, the smell of pennies making her nauseous. The thought keeps lunging at the inside of her skull.

_My partner’s been shot._

Only it doesn’t stop there. It rolls out like a ball of string, snagging against the corners of her mind.

_My partner’s been shot. My best friend is dying. Why wasn’t I there? Why didn’t I stop it? How could this have happened?_

She knows how it happened, of course. They grew careless. Their own pride made them lazy and complacent. They were _the best of the best_. They were stupid. The hundred little things they did wrong pricks her memories like needles. They’re splinters under her skin, taunting her.

A nurse—Charlotte, maybe—says she couldn’t get ahold of his next of kin, and leaves a message. Clarke looks at the name, Octavia Woods, but she doesn’t recognize it. The number listed has a D.C. area code, and Clarke realizes Octavia must be the mysterious girlfriend-grandmother-aunt Bellamy is always calling. The _relationship to patient_ box is left blank. Clarke has never felt more useless as a partner.

She calls Chief Kane to explain. A few patrol officers have been called out to the motel after the gunshot. The shooter was already gone when she raced to the room. She didn’t bother searching for them—another mistake. She should have cleared the room, and she didn’t have a weapon.

And there was Bellamy, blood pooling out of the hole in his chest. He was unconscious but his eyes were open, and at first she thought he was dead. Then she remembered corpses don’t bleed, and she ripped the quilt off the bed and used it to stop up the wound.

The doctors found his badge hidden in his boot. His gun was tucked in his back pocket like a gangster’s. His story was he’d stolen it off a dead cop.

He wore their cover stories with such ease, and she’d always thought she’d be the one to get made.

Detective Murphy calls her to ask after Bellamy. Murphy didn’t actually like Bellamy—very few cops do—but it’s all about politics at the station. He has to seem concerned.

They haven’t found the dealer or his list, and no one had seen the shooter. It’ll take days to test all the fingerprints and DNA samples found in that motel room. She tells him that Bellamy is fine, even though she doesn’t know for sure. They’re still in the middle of surgery. The bullet ripped through something important, but she doesn’t know what. She’s just a med school dropout, and she’s not on any of his legal forms; they won’t tell her anything.

Clarke sits on the floor of the waiting room so she won’t get comfortable and fall asleep. She drinks cup after cup of stale coffee, until she thinks she might throw up. She chews through two packs of gum to keep herself awake. She thinks about calling her mother for the childish sort of comfort moms always give, but she doesn’t even know what to say.

Finally one of the surgeons walks out, gloves still gooey from Bellamy’s insides. She tries not to stare.

“You can go in and see him,” he smiles faintly. “He’ll be fine once the anesthesia wears off.”

She wants to ask how that’s possible; she’d seen the gallon of blood he’d leaked onto the floor and the bedspread. She’d seen his ribcage split open so they could poke around and frown at the damage. The slope of their shoulders had held little hope. His eyes had begun getting paler.

Instead she leaps up without a word and runs to his room. It’s small, but it has walls and a door which is better than most get. He isn’t wearing a gown, but the sheets are pulled up to his waist and thick bandages cover most of his torso. Tubes snake out of his nose and skin. The shrill beep of his pulse is steady with life. He looks awful, with long hair matted in grease, blood and sweat. His normally dark skin has gone pale with blood-loss, and his freckles barely show through. The sores she’d drawn on his face have smeared into runny blotches. She grabs a napkin and wiped them away. His eyelids twitch and she wonders if he’s dreaming.

Clarke has just begun drifting off when Bellamy finally stirs. It’s late the next morning, and the sunlight falls harsh on his sickly skin. It makes his beard shine pink where blood has stuck in the hair. She stands abruptly as he glances around the room, confusion in the lines of his eyes.

“How much do you remember,” she starts.

“Who are you?” He stares at her with an empty expression. Everything inside her goes cold.

“That’s not funny,” she warns, hoping he’s just making a bad joke. It’s exactly the sort of thing he would do, just after nearly dying.

The grin cracks his face in half. There’s a scab on his lower lip and it splits open as he smiled. “Don’t worry, I remember you, Princess.” Blood trickles down his chin but he doesn’t seem to notice. “How long have I been here?” He tries to sit up but winces and surrenders. His voice sounds cancerous. He looks hollow.

Clarke tries to keep her voice steady. “A few hours. It happened yesterday.”

She’s going to say _you were shot yesterday_ , but thinks better of it. He stays quiet as she folds herself into the chair. When she can’t stand the silence anymore, she breaks it.

“Did you recognize your attacker?” Bellamy shakes his head and she can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it. She switches gears. “The hospital tried to call Octavia Woods, but couldn’t get through.”

She wants him to tell her who Octavia is, but instead he shrugs dismissively. “Probably for the best; don’t want her to worry.”

As he speaks, the door flies open and crashes against the wall. They turn, startled, to find a young brown-haired girl fuming in the doorway. Clarke opens her mouth but the girl speaks first, staring hard at a shocked Bellamy.

“O,” he starts weakly. The girl shakes her head, sending dark curls wildly about her face.

“Don’t you _O_ me, you bastard!” The sharpness of her words send Clarke into silence. The girl presses on. “You get shot, and I have to find out from some message left by a stranger?” She’s furious, and Clarke knows instantly that this is Octavia Woods.

She’s pretty, Clarke realizes. She’s striking, really, with hair impressively long and a deep brown, and eyes starkly blue by contrast. She’s thin like a model, and long-limbed, and with her hands on her hips she looks regal.

Bellamy waits for her to finish shouting, calmer than Clarke has ever seen him. When Octavia finally stops, she takes a shaky breath and dares him to try and explain himself.

“How’d you even get here this fast?” he wonders. Clarke watches as Octavia becomes outraged all over again.

“By plane, you, _you_ ,” she pauses, at a loss for words.

“I missed you too,” Bellamy smiles, and Clarke watches as all the girl’s anger washes away. She marches up to his side and frowns down at him.

“I was so worried,” she accuses.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Clarke has never heard Bellamy genuinely apologize. The conversation is quickly making her feel like an intruder. She wishes she could seep into the wall like mold or water. She stands awkwardly, intending to leave so they can have some privacy.

Bellamy grabs her wrist. “Princess,” he nods towards his visitor, who seems to suddenly realize there’s someone else in the room. “This is Octavia. O, this is my partner. Clarke.” The girls shake hands and Octavia turns to offer Bellamy a sly smile.

“So _this_ is the girl you’ve been talking about nonstop—“

“What,” Bellamy glances between the two. “No,” he turns to Clarke. “I don’t do that.”

“Yes he does,” Octavia argues.

“No, no, I don’t,” he maintains. “I…look, I…I’ve been shot. I am wounded. And you are a liar, who lies.”

Clarke isn’t sure how she feels about the idea of Bellamy talking about her with some strange girl she didn’t know. Octavia laughs as he flusters.

“You’re making my stitches hurt,” he accuses. Octavia waves the words off and turns to Clarke.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she gushes. “Sorry about earlier; I was just so,” she pauses. “Cranky. From the flight over.” She turns back to Bellamy before Clarke can respond. “I hope you know I’m not paying for a hotel room.”

He shrugs and winces, having forgotten about his own injury. “I’ve got a spare,” he assures her.

Something else is said between them, wordlessly. Clarke wonders if she should try leaving again, so they can speak freely. She’s pretty sure she and Bellamy will be spending the next few nights at their separate apartments, which shouldn’t really bother her as much as it does. She can’t really remember the last time they didn’t end up falling asleep in the same room, sometimes tangled up together. But she hardly thinks Octavia will be comfortable with Clarke crashing on the couch while she visits, and anyway it’s a little embarrassing; Bellamy probably hasn’t even noticed their weird codependent sleeping habits. Clarke turns towards the door.

“Princess,” Bellamy calls. There’s a whine in his voice, which means he wants something. Probably food.

“Hmm?” She watches from the corner of her eye as Octavia slides into the chair. Bellamy grins at Clarke like a spoiled child.

“Get me some Jello?” He begs it, which usually annoys her, but she’s too preoccupied with Octavia’s sudden existence.

“Sure, yeah,” she decides, slipping softly out the door.

She scrubs her arms up to the elbows in the hall bathroom sink. The water is hot enough to sting, but the heat comforts her. She hopes it will boil the feel of his blood away. She wets a paper towel and scrubs both her knees, and what she can from her hair and dress.

The reflection shows her what everyone else must have been seeing all night; not a cop, but a prostitute covered in blood, with unwashed hair and smeared mascara. Her lips are painted clown red, and some has smudged into the corners of her mouth. She wears a fake crown tattoo over her collar bone, and it’s grown sticky like wax in the heat. She needs a shower and a few hours of rest. Most of the coffee has run through her system, and that morning’s adrenaline has left her feeling used up.

She heads back to the room, green Jello cup in hand, meaning to drop it off quickly and then head home. She walks in to find Octavia’s feet propped up on the side of Bellamy’s bed. They’re laughing over some joke she didn’t hear. They turn in tandem as she opens the door, and she’s suddenly struck by their close resemblance.

Their eyes are different colors, but the same shape. Their hair is different in length, but the same deep brown, nearly black. Octavia is paler, without the trademark Blake freckles, and Bellamy has broader shoulders, but Octavia sits in the same slouch Bellamy always sinks to in stake outs, and when he’s cooped up at his desk. Or relaxing on Clarke’s sofa.

Clarke checked up on Bellamy the first day she met him. She found his mother’s death certificate—lung cancer at thirty-five—and by all accounts, his father had left them some time before that. Clarke found not so much as a second cousin, and yet here the two were, so obviously related. She hates that she took so long to notice.

Clarke sits the Jello down on the stand next to Bellamy, but he makes no move towards it. Instead he waggles his eyebrows up at her suggestively.

“How much for seven minutes?” He winks. Clarke wonders if he’s on morphine.

Octavia rolls her eyes. “There he goes, feeling better already.” She turns to Clarke and shakes her head. “Can you imagine growing up with that?”

Clarke grins. “That’s nothing. I have to spend all day in a car with it.”

Just a few days ago, they were tailing a suspect, with microphones in their ears so they could communicate from either end of the street. Bellamy spent a full twenty minutes rating each passerby on his _scale of attraction_. Clarke thinks about telling the story to Octavia, but isn’t sure how she’d take it.

“Our mom used to say he’d be a lady killer,” Octavia jokes, glancing at him sideways. “Who knew he’d be killing them with bad jokes and poor hygiene?”

“Hey,” Bellamy frowns. “I look like this cause I’m undercover!”

Octavia raises a brow. “And the smell?”

Bellamy gives a grin filled with dentures. “It completes the illusion. _That_ , is the smell of good police work.” Octavia and Clarke exchange glances over his head.

“No,” Clarke corrects, “ _That_ , is the smell of STDs.”

Octavia giggles as Bellamy frowns. “Have you noticed that I’ve been shot?”

Octavia rolls her eyes. “Eat your Jello, you baby.”

 

Octavia is an _Undercover Consultant_ for the FBI, something which Clarke didn’t know existed. Bellamy explains it’s a lot like what they do, and that Octavia is well-known within the criminal community because she used to be one. It’s hard for Clarke to imagine the nicely dressed brunette as an infamous crook, but she imagines it’s probably hard for someone to look at her and see a cop.

 _Undercover Consultant_ , _Undercover Specialists_ —Clarke is getting tired of all the unnecessary titles when all it comes down to is they’re good at catching bad guys and blending in with the wrong crowd.

She waits until Octavia leaves for the cafeteria before turning to Bellamy, questions written all over her face. He sighs and swallows the last of his Jello, staring straight ahead to where his sister was just standing.

“You wanna know why I never told you I have a sister,” he guesses. Clarke shrugs and settles into the seat cushion.

“I know why you didn’t tell me.” And she does. In all their years as partners, family rarely comes up because families are liabilities and it’s best to never mention them out loud.

“Then you wanna know why she isn’t listed in my folder,” he decides. She fidgets, equal parts curious and embarrassed. He knew she checked up on him; he’d probably known since she ran the search. She knows he probably did the same, but it doesn’t make her feel less sneaky.

“You have different last names,” she adds. That had thrown her for a minute; Octavia isn’t married.

“Different dads,” Bellamy explains. “Grew up on opposite ends of the country, too.”

They _did_ talk about the different places they lived; Clarke had moved from city to city, continent to continent. When she stays too still for too long her legs start itching. She’ll run until she’s tired, buy an apartment and settle down for another two years. Los Angeles is the longest period of stillness in her life for some time, and they both know he’s the reason. Bellamy grew up in Idaho and hitchhiked to L.A. at seventeen. _Seemed as good a place as any,_ he’d laugh.

“I just sort of assumed you were an only child, like me,” she admits. Bellamy’s grin becomes a wince as he shifts towards her.

“I’ve got two sisters, actually. A brother, too.” He shrugs at Clarke’s surprise. “Our parents got around. I only really know O.”

“She seems like a great sister,” Clarke offers. “She was really worried.” Bellamy shrugs again.

“O has this thing, with me being injured. Her dad was Special Ops and he got captured overseas. They tortured and killed him—shot him right through the head.”

The ease with which he explains it makes Clarke uncomfortable. She goes rigid with the horribleness of the story. “Jesus,” is all she can say.

Bellamy nods grimly. “Yeah. It sucked; he was a really cool guy.”

Clarke thinks about Bellamy’s own father, the one that ran out on his dying mom and young son. She wonders if that makes Octavia’s dad’s end even more bitter, salt in a wound. That the good father died while the bad one walked away.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and winces. She should really be better at this comforting thing. Bellamy just shrugs.

“It was a long time ago,” he says, and then eyes her, grinning enough to make her nervous. Bellamy usually only grins like that when he’s having a _really_ bad idea. Like lock picking the motel room of a dangerous criminal. “You were jealous,” he accuses, happily.

Clarke chokes on nothing. “What?” she asks, shaking her head. “No,” she frowns. She should be better at lying, too. She chalks it up to the overall anxiety of her partner being shot. “I was _confused_ ,” she explains. “Which you may have confused with jealousy, because you’re concussed.”

“Also shot,” he chirps.

“Also shot,” Clarke agrees.

“You were confused,” Bellamy nods, still grinning cheekily. “But you were jealous, too. You thought O was my girlfriend.”

“Gross,” Clarke makes a face, like she _hadn’t_ been thinking that exact thing, just fifteen minutes before. Bellamy just shrugs.

“She isn’t,” he says, unnecessarily. “I don’t have one. A girlfriend. Which you know, because you’re a good cop, and you know basically everything about me. Like a stalker.”

“Or just a really good cop,” Clarke says, a little unsure about the turn this conversation has taken. It’s basically emotional whiplash, and she’s still wearing her gross drug-addict-prostitute costume. She really needs to shower, and change into her sweats. Maybe a nurse might take pity on her, and let her have a hospital gown. It can’t be any worse than what she’s in, now.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, smile going lopsided with the drugs. “That’s it, definitely. You don’t have a boyfriend,” he adds, and Clarke goes stiff.

“What,” she says rather than asks. She really doesn’t want to talk about this.

“Or girlfriend,” Bellamy amends, looking sheepish. She’d only just come out to him a few months ago, when she started up with a DEA agent named Lexa. He’d been a little surprised, but ultimately supportive. And when she and Lexa broke up, he’d showed up at her apartment with a six-pack and taped baseball reruns. He’d periodically offered comforting lines like, _you deserve better_ , or _she had terrible taste in music, so you’re better off_ , all night.

“I know,” Clarke frowns. She’s been too busy—first with the Wallace case, now the drug mules from Polis—she hasn’t really had time to make a page for Match.com, or anything.

Bellamy nods agreeably. “So neither of us should be jealous,” he decides. Clarke stares at him a little dumbly.

“Bellamy,” Clarke stutters, “What—”

“I’m in love with you,” Bellamy shrugs, eyes mostly closed and face relaxed, like he hasn’t just dropped a fucking bombshell on her. “Have been for a while. And I know you think about me in the shower, so,” he waggles his eyebrows pointedly.

“That was _one time_ ,” Clarke splutters, still a little stuck on the fact that her best friend is in love with her. She’s in love with him too, obviously, but. It’s surreal, hearing it out loud.

“Still happened,” he declares, and then opens his eyes and turns his head a little so he’s facing her, eyes stern and serious. “I’m in love with you,” he repeats, “And I think you’re in love with me too, and I want to do this. Really do it. Chips on the table. All in.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, because _of course_ he can’t just _not_ ruin it with a Poker reference, honestly. “Maybe we should have this conversation when you’re more sober,” she suggests, “And less shot.” But she winds her fingers through his, to let him know she means it. If he remembers, that is. He squeezes her hand.

“Fine,” he agrees, eyes sliding shut again. Clarke’s pretty sure Octavia’s not coming back for a while. “But we are gonna talk about this when I wake up,” he says firmly. “I’m not forgetting. I don’t care what Kane has to say, or Tsing. Just you and me.”

In reality, it probably won’t work out, Clarke knows; they’re both too stubborn, too set in their own ways. Plus, coworkers at the station aren’t supposed to date, let alone partners, and Kane will definitely find out because he’s like a bloodhound with this sort of thing, and he’s had it out for them for a while now. And she didn’t even know about Bellamy’s _sister_ , so odds are they’ll fight over his lack of trust in her, or her cynicism, and the explosion will be spectacular.

But, until then— _just you and me_ has a nice ring to it.

“Just us,” Clarke agrees, and squeezes his hand back. Odds are, he won’t even remember.


End file.
